The Red King's Dream or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland, and: The Alice Companion: A Guide to Lewis Carroll's Alice Books, and: Lewis Carroll and Alice: New Horizons (review)

Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone. The Red King's Dream, or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland. London: Pimlico, 1996.

------. The Alice Companion: A Guide to Lewis Carroll's Alice Books. London: Macmillan, 1998.

Stephanie Lovett Stoffel. Lewis Carroll and Alice: New Horizons. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997.

Am I a deep philosopher or a great genius? I think neither. What talents I have I desire to devote to His Service and may he purify me and take away my pride and selfishness. Oh that I might hear, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

--Lewis Carroll's private journal, 7 January 1856

One day, while teaching Alice in Wonderland out of the Griffith and Frey anthology, I felt like I was spinning and spinning through that rabbit hole so often identified as the vagina dentata. No, I wasn't caught, but then my being female must have had something to do with it. I just felt that I had come out on the other side of the world. I found myself telling my students that Alice's version of "I am old Father William" was a subversion of the classic British educational system, that Alice was going through not just an adolescent questioning but a questioning of the politics of the Victorian educational system, that her journey along the river, all on a summer's day, was a period of questioning of her lessons, of being on time, of wearing white gloves, of enduring prim and proper tea parties and endless croquet games, and a questioning of where she belonged in this hierarchy of Englishness and Englishism and whether she belonged there at all. But we know that little prim but coquettish Miss Alice Liddell knew she wanted to be not only English, but from reading Carroll's diaries, that her mother harbored a secret desire to see her married to Leopold, the fourth son of Queen Victoria, that paragon of empire herself. So who was revolting against being colonized? Miss Alice, or the creator of the fictional Alice, Lewis Carroll?

Here is where the wonderful new book by Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone, The Red King's Dream, comes in. It gives us an in-depth insight into Lewis Carroll's politics. I happened on the book by chance. In pursuit of my notion that Carroll may have harbored fairly liberal points of view toward empire and colonialism, I tried to trace my steps through the Christ Church College wonderland on the Lewis Carroll Centenary tours in Oxford. I had been in the British Library during the last days of the manuscript reading room in the museum building, reading Carroll's diaries to see if he said anything about empire. I found some references to conversations he had about New Zealand and his interest in Ireland, and some references to India. Carroll was certainly not a royalist and his alienation was heightened when he was not invited to the Deanery when the royals visited there in 1863. On June 16, 1863, he took the famous photo of the royals at a distance from a telescope. The Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, "Bertie" (later Edward VII), was at Christ Church for a while. On June 16, both the Prince and Carroll went to help Alice set up her stall with puppies at the Bazaar. Carroll was made to creep under a counter. But Carroll noted, "the Prince bowed and made a remark about a picture. I don't know whether he knew me" (British Library Add Mss 54341). However, at Christ Church, I ran into a meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society in whose bookshop I found The Red King's Dream, which...